Two interesting announcements from the BBC made at the Edinburgh International Television(?) Festival. First, they are reviewing their website operations which already has 2,000,000 pages and is used by 43% of Britons a month. It cost £72m to run in 2002. [By that price the nine million buck Virtual Charlottetown must be up to about 100,000 pages. I'll check later and do a page count.] Second, the Beeb is planning to release their entire TV archive online...for free personal use. It's too bad the whole of the CBC, whose web presence front page is a nice looking news ticker tape and programme guide for other media, wasn't structured more closely to the British model, whose web front page is an index of everything. I'd pay for that.

Later: Steve at AOV has more on the second BBC announcement discussed above.  The first reply points out CBC does have a small archive but, in true Canadian fashion, it is of "important moments in Canada". It does not let the individual decide what is important or of interest to him or her. Put it all up, please.

Later still: Aaron Swartz has some great quotes on the implications and reasons for the release of the full BBC archive on his site.